Ubuntu
fonts-dejavu package

Characters missing in special character selection window

Bug #239010 reported by Ulrich Lukas on 2008-06-10

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	fonts-dejavu (Ubuntu)	Fix Released	Low	Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: openoffice.org

Hi,

I'm using Openoffice.org 2.4.1~rc2-1ubuntu1 on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy AMD64.

In the special character selection window ("Insert", "Special Character"), the displayed table of characters contains gaps, i.e. Unicode character 2248 is displayed correctly. The next character displayed right next to the previous should of course be 2249. But this is not always the case. E.g. the next character as in my attached screenshot is in fact 2260! This means that several characters are not displayed at all.

Selecting a special subset of Unicode characters in the top right selection box doesn't change the table of characters. The Gaps still exist, and other characters from a different subset are still displayed instead.

Additionally, some characters show up only in form of a small rectangle, but only in the table on the left. They are displayed correctly on the right side of the window.

A screenshot is available under: http://datenparkplatz.de/DiesUndDas/spCharacterProblem.png

This affects many important mathematical characters useful in all language versions.

Revision history for this message

Ulrich Lukas (ulrich-lukas) wrote on 2008-06-10:

spCharacterProblem.png Edit (101.3 KiB, image/png)

Revision history for this message

Brian Murray (brian-murray) wrote on 2008-06-17:

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. I've confirmed this using openoffice.org version 2.4.1-1ubuntu1 from Hardy -proposed.

Changed in openoffice.org:
importance:	Undecided → Low
status:	New → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

Chris Cheney (ccheney) wrote on 2008-06-17:

I think this may actually be a bug in the Bitstream Vera Sans font. The way OOo works is it only shows glyphs for a font in the special character menu if they exist in the font. Which explains the gap in the font for 2248 -> 2260. However some are showing up as the blank box glyph. I am not certain but it may be that the font claims to have a glyph for that character but doesn't actually have one.

Reassigning to ttf-bitstream-vera to have someone look into the font to see if it is actually claiming (somehow?) to have glyphs for characters it doesn't have glyphs for. If it isn't, then it might be possible there is a bug in OOo that causes it to only show the blank box (null glyph box) for some characters but not others.

Thanks,

Chris

Changed in openoffice.org:
status:	Confirmed → New

Revision history for this message

Ulrich Lukas (ulrich-lukas) wrote on 2008-06-18:

I can select, copy, paste, use all the characters that are missing in OOo, in the following Ubuntu application:
gucharmap 2.22.1-0ubuntu2

Revision history for this message

Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb) wrote on 2022-11-02 (last edit on 2022-11-02):

Not reproducible with Vera’s successor DejaVu and OOo’s successor LibreOffice on Lunar. The missing glyphs on the Special Characters window could be explained by the fact OOo used to display that grid with the thinnest font weight, inexplicably, which didn’t match the font file displayed at the bottom left of the dialog, again, for no good reason.